Okie Craft: An Interview with Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
The Okie Craft Series focuses on the Oklahoma writing life. We interview writers across the state about their writing practice and about what it means to be part of the Oklahoma literary community.
We asked writer, editor, scholar, and former Oklahoma poet laureate, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish about her writing life. Here’s what she said.
What does it mean to be an “Oklahoma Writer”? And what is your connection to the state?
An “Oklahoma Writer” is a person associated with Oklahoma who, when writing about Oklahoma or Oklahomans, takes seriously the responsibility to honestly and authentically represent our state and our people. To tell our stories, the good and the bad and the ugly. Some Oklahoma writers were born and / or raised in the state, some have become Okies by choice or employment. Some who grew up elsewhere have deep family ties to Oklahoma and have spent extended periods in the state, absorbing our culture—staying with grandma in the summer, for instance or coming home for ceremonies. I include screenwriters, historians, journalists, and nonfiction writers in this definition as well as those who write in genres under the “creative writing” umbrella: fiction, poetry, and memoir.
I’m a born (Hobart) and raised (Wewoka) 4th generation (pre-Statehood) stone-cold Okie.
What first got you into writing?
My mother read stories and poetry to me before I could read on my own and for some time afterwards. She also taught me about genre—“this is a story, a made-up story, this is a story that happened, this is a poem about someone’s feelings.” I wrote my first poem in second grade after witnessing a pack of feral dogs kill my dog. My teacher made a big deal out of it and put it up in the classroom, my mother put it on the fridge. So, I came to writing through a highly-emotional inciting incident, an understanding that poems are for talking about emotions, and encouragement from my teacher and my mother (who also wrote poetry).
You run the blog “Archive Serendipities” with Cullen Whisenhunt. Would you tell us a little more about the work you guys do there?
In March 2014, I was awarded an Oklahoma Humanities Council Scholar’s Grant to research Oklahoma literary history. I established the Archive Serendipities blog as the “public-facing” project of the grant. Cullen joined me as Archive Serendipities’ co-editor in 2023. He is a professor at Eastern Oklahoma State College (McAlester) and he teaches Oklahoma Literary History whenever he gets the opportunity.
Our mission is to recover Oklahoma’s literary history and make it available to everyone—especially to Oklahoma writers, readers, and academics. It’s important for our writers to “know where they came from,” to have some acquaintance with Oklahoma literary traditions—to discover that we have a literary history. It’s important for academics who study regional literatures to have an Oklahoma literary history resource. For Oklahoma readers, teachers, and students, I hope that the information we share will serve as a basis for bragging rights—for Oklahomans to celebrate our rich literary history. Subscriptions to Archive Serendipities are, and will always be, free.
Because we’re both poets, Archive Serendipities has so far concentrated on poetry. We’d love to receive guest-post queries on Oklahoma prose writers and their works, so long as they began publishing before 1940. Todd Downing, Louis L’Amour, and Jim Thompson already have plenty of press.
Please read our “Human Friends and Book Friends” post to experience the collective, collaborative spirit of Archive Serendipities. We’re indebted to Oklahoma librarians, writers, and readers who have contributed to the Archive Serendipities knowledge bank. The Oklahoma Department of Library’s Oklahoma Collection and the Oklahoma History Center’s Gateway to Oklahoma History have been essential for our research.
You can download our scissortail-embellished Oklahoma Poetry by the Numbers handout, here.
Along with your work as a poet, you have many publications on literary history. How does your academic scholarship fit in with your creative practice?
My literary history work grew out of my fascination with Oklahoma history and culture as do many of my poems. The academic products—essays, presentations—allow the opportunity to spread the word about Oklahoma’s literary history.
Through research on their lives and reading their work, some of these writers now feel like family to me—like three-generations-past blood-family members who I never knew in person but were familiar to me through stories. This is especially true for Josie Craig Berry since I spent so much time with her while editing her Collected Poems.
The literary history work deepens and expands my craft knowledge. I’m reading enormous amounts of poetry written across more than a century. In order to do so, it’s necessary to exercise my knowledge of formal craft elements—meter, rhyme, form, mode, occasion. Since my bachelors and masters are in 18th century British poetry, I thought I knew what I was doing.
However, there were times when reading Josie’s work that her mastery of form and her ability to successfully modify received forms left me struggling to understand what she’d done. I'd call out loud, “Josie! What are you doing in this poem?” But, in order to write about her poetics, I had to figure it out. And, I eventually did.
One of my rare poems in form is a fourteener entitled “Reckoning” that I composed in 2018 while wrestling with Josie’s work. Elise Paschen (an Oklahoma poet), selected the poem for her anthology, The Eloquent Poem (which also includes work by Quraysh Ali Lansana). If Josie hadn’t schooled me in formal poetry, if I hadn’t found her work through Oklahoma literary history research, I am convinced that the poem wouldn’t exist and, therefore, I would not have this prestigious publication credit. Thank you, Josie.
In your introduction to the Oklahoma Writing issue of Sugar Mule*, you wrote “in the minds of most people who do not live here, Oklahoma is an unexplored land, inhabited (if at all) by unexamined cultures and unknown people.” In your essay “Western Civilization” you used a similar phrase: “The West is a place that has been explored but remains unexplored.” Could you say more about what it means to be from a place unknown/unexplored?
Those two statements were influenced by memories of people in late-1980s New York asking if we all lived in tipis or just the Indians. Moreover, they had no idea of where Oklahoma was located in respect to other states—our large central section of land was a blank spot. Flyover country. They are theoretical metaphors for intellectual and cultural misrecognition rather than a description of the place called Oklahoma or “the West.”
I believed that the “unwritten” and “unexamined” and “unexplored” paradigm was a good approximation of the situation when I began systematically researching Oklahoma literary history twenty-two years ago. It’s not that there weren’t any Oklahoma writers who had national reputations. It’s that there wasn’t a critical mass of Oklahoma writers and stories that captured national attention, However, those terms no longer describe Oklahoma’s presence in cultural representations.
In the last 15 years or so, award-winning creative works by Oklahoma screenwriters and filmmakers and writers have attained critical mass and exploded onto the national scene. And, they reflect back to us our complex histories and varied cultures in an authentic manner. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to clarify and revise my thinking on this topic.
[*The issue, with a few additions, became the anthology Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing.]
What/who are your biggest influences? Literary or otherwise.
Rilla Askew because she takes seriously the responsibility to represent honestly our state, its culture, and its people in her writing—the good and the bad and the ugly. She has an exceptional ear for Oklahoma vernacular language and is able to make it come alive on the page. Her Oklahoma characters, even minor characters, ring true every single time. Moreover, Rilla mentors all of us Oklahoma writers—I try to follow her example in mentoring others.
I’m not going to name any Oklahoma writers that influence me other than Rilla because I don’t want to cause bad feelings by picking and choosing. There are approximately 200 books in my Oklahoma Writing bookcase. All of those books have influenced me—they share with me their craft knowledge, their methods of representing our state and people.
Below is a list of writers whose work I return to again and again. They’ve influenced my work in various ways that are unique to each writer.
Tracy K. Smith, Major Jackson, Ada Limon, James Wright, William Merwin, Muriel Rukeyser, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Martín Espada, June Jordan, Federico García Lorca, Carl Sandburg (The People, Yes), Laura Da', Tommy Pico, Italo Calvino, Octavia E. Butler, William Gibson, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, George Orwell (essays), Joan Didion, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Terry Tempest Williams, Amy Irvine, Kat Meads
Best advice for writers? (Especially those working outside of what are often thought of as the “big literary cities.”)
1. If you can’t find a literary community, create one.
2. Your (small towns, rural homesteads, neighborhoods, families, work lives, inner lives, experiences, obsessions) are as good a place to write from as anywhere else.
3. As award-winning Oklahoma writer Lou Berney has said, “There are two kinds of books: good ones and bad ones. Try to write the good ones.”
What (if any) are a writer’s responsibilities to the place(s) they come from?
See my answer to question #1 and replace “Oklahoma” with the name of your place.
What is one stereotype or myth about Oklahoma you wish you could dispel with your work?
That we’re all a bunch of ignorant rednecks. Some of us are intelligent rednecks. Many of us are intelligent bankers and lawyers and doctors and nurses and writers and electricians and plumbers and musicians and teachers and farmers. Some of us do suffer from ignorance, bless their hearts. But that doesn’t mean we’re all stupid. Some of us need to remember our manners. Some of us feed the hungry.
You can read a one of Jeanetta’s poems, “Driving Lost Roads Listening to Jedi Mind Tricks”* by clicking here.
To read an interactive, Google Maps version of the poem, click here.
*Originally published in About Place, Voices of the Human Spirit. Vol. 3, Issue 4, November 2014.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is the author of What I Learned at the War (2016, West End Press-poetry), Oklahomeland: Essays (2015, Lamar University Press), and Work Is Love Made Visible: Poetry and Family Photographs (2009, West End Press), which won the Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, and the Willa Award from Women Writing the West. Her collection Tongue Tied Woman won the 2001 Edda Poetry Chapbook for Women Competition. She is the editor of Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing and The Collected Poems of Josie Craig Berry. Jeanetta served as Oklahoma State Poet Laureate from 2017-2020 and was awarded a 2019 Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. An instructor for the University of Arkansas Monticello MFA program, Dr. Mish teaches poetry craft and American working-class literature. Jeanetta serves on the editorial board of The New Territory Magazine.
